Race in Fiction

Racism in historical fiction. It's a tough topic. If the writer isn't going to sugarcoat the past there will inevitably arise situations that make the reader uncomfortable. I don't think that's all bad. And as far as fiction goes, a necessity to some degree since narrative as we know it means there is some tension. But there is a lot of wiggle-room for the how and the how much of showing our uglier elements. Christopher Paul Curtis writes Bud, Not Buddy without ever using the N-word, whereas in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the word appears 13 times in an Amazon search.

There are a number of racial slurs in my novel. One is spic. That word appears in many works dating from before 1959 -- Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, for one (1934)  and it was one I heard growing up in Michigan. This brings me to a good point, How do we know that people in 1959 used words like these? Were they being taped? Maybe. I don't have access to any FBI files! But there are other ways of guessing with some accuracy. If a term has quite a bit of currency sometime before 1959, we can figure that it was used there. If not that exact term, then something similar. In 1947 Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire opened. In that play Stanley refers to the Mexican character Pablo (we are never told what his citizenship is) as a "greaseball." Wiktionary says this is usually a term of abuse for people of Italian decent. Stanley does right around this point in the play start talking about his time in the war in Italy. There may be some blurring with an older term, greaser, for Mexicans. Wikipedia cites some interesting book titles such as Bronco Billy and the Greaser (1914).

For me the term greaseball seemed not quite right for Chuck. But it wasn't something I labored over. I have him refer to some Latinos as greasers. Maybe in the back of my mind I was thinking of John Travolta and Lenny and Squiggee. Who knows? I may have even been misremembering the line from Tennessee Williams. It is a bit of trivia that I once played Pablo in a community theater production of A Streetcar Named Desire, on whose authority I was going to stand with the term -- until I looked it up! It could be that our Stanley was saying greaser and not greaseball. The larger point is, these were offensive terms then and still are today. Although, apparently beaner is used a lot again. And I think that is a resurrection of an older term. I didn't get to flamboyant with terms of abuse for Latinos. I'm not sure why. There are more racial epithets for blacks in my novel than any other group, and I suppose that is not completely unexpected, given our history in America.

There is a lot more to say on this divisive and important topic and I'll have to return to it. Let me end here by simply saying that I always knew there was a racial element to this story. It wasn't the easiest part of the story to tell, and harder still when my characters thought the "funniest thing" -- I use that phrase once and only once in the novel -- was a terribly racist remark. It's a telling moment. It shows that Chuck survives in part by imagining others in rank below himself. His dad may be in jail but at least he isn't -- you fill in the racial slur. And it is at this moment that we then learn of the fate of Kenny Kilpatrick, an even based on an historical occurrence.